Dantes' Inferno (35 page)

It set in motion a chain of events, which was certainly what M had anticipated. The Feds were talking to Sweetheart again; they asked him to focus his team on the rudimentary map that had shown up in Dantes' cell three days earlier. The consensus: M's next move—the seventh circle—would be directly connected to information contained on that single sheet of paper.

Sylvia left her suitcases in one of several guest rooms in Sweetheart's house. As she retraced her steps along a hall, the first person she encountered was Gretchen, who handed her several books; from the titles, histories of Los Angeles.

“‘New city stands on ruins old,'” Gretchen quoted. Behind thick tortoise spectacles, saucer-shaped baby blues sized up Sylvia. “I almost forgot.” She turned to retrieve a stack of computer printouts from a desk. “Bella Dantes. You wanted to know about her suicide, so I focused on medical history, for example, possible psychiatric commitment. Nothing under Bella Dantes . . . which is why the press never got wind.”

Gretchen tapped her glasses. “So I ran
Caldini
, her maiden name.” She grinned. “
Bingo
. Bella Caldini spent two weeks at County General in the locked ward. And she was recommitted about six weeks before she drowned herself. The docs thought she was a high-functioning schizophrenic.”

“You're a genius,” Sylvia said, stacking the pages on top of the books.

“I know.” Gretchen winked. “We've got a desk set up for you in the office next to the guest room where you'll
be sleeping. Or you're welcome to claim your territory out here. There's a fresh pot of espresso. You know the drill.”

In the main work area, Sylvia chose the wide leather armchair that occupied a corner. Opposite her, Gretchen was at work analyzing M's latest message for verbal content, syntax, anomalies, and patterns.

The large room was awash with sunshine. Both the Jack Russell terrier and the English bulldog were stretched blissfully on the rug. Sylvia tried to focus on the history books, but the light was giving her a headache. Thinking a jolt of espresso might help, she poured herself a cup.

While she sipped the coffee, she found herself replaying her brief phone conversation with Leo Carreras: “Why didn't you tell me about the amytal interview? A knock on the door, a phone call? Either would've worked.”

Leo hadn't hesitated. “If the FBI wants to keep you informed, that's their job, not mine.”

“This isn't about the FBI's conduct. It's about you and me. I trusted you.”

“And I'm in love with you. But that's nothing new . . . we've both known how I felt . . . since the day I first saw you. Good old Leo, the fallback guy. Things don't always turn out the way we want.”

“Leo . . .”

What had she wanted to say to him?

“Are you sure you aren't trying to save Dantes' soul?” Leo had finally asked. “Good guys and bad. Choose sides, Sylvia.”

The memory dissolved; she found herself studying the enlarged map of Dante Alighieri's
Inferno
that still decorated one wall. A red pushpin now occupied the inner edge of the sixth circle, the cusp of the seventh circle, where someone had carefully printed,
SINS OF VIOLENCE
. From the
seventh circle, hell deepened to the eighth—and finally, it fell into the deep pit of the ninth and final circle.

12:39
P.M
.
In contrast to blinding daylight, Luke's office was the long polar night. The green-violet glow from a half dozen monitors did little to disturb the cavelike darkness.

He had the glazed expression of a man running on half rations of sleep. His blond hair was sprouting like a new wheat crop. His tattooed flying fish hovered airborne on his buffed biceps. His feet were tapping to an inaudible rhythm.

Sylvia knew just how he felt: frustrated, manic, wired.

At the moment he was staring, transfixed, at a wide computer screen. Over his shoulder she studied the symbols, searching for familiar urban topography, something that resembled Los Angeles.

Without looking up he said, “This is the county's primary maintenance map.”

“Then it's underground?”

“LA's
subterranean
infrastructure.” Luke offered a weary smile. “
Inferno
.”

She leaned closer, trying to find points of orientation. The bangle on her left wrist trapped a splinter of light, then set it free. “So where's downtown?”

He pointed to an area in the upper right quadrant of the monitor. “Think of it as a skyscraper, only going
down
instead of up. You've got your electric and phone casings a few feet below the pavement. Your utility vaults start at that level, too, and go down about eight feet. Then, on the next level down, you've got your gas lines; then the water lines and mains; then steam; then sewers. The subway vaults could be anywhere from fifteen feet to twenty stories underground; and down below it all run the storm
drains, the storm tunnels, which are also the biggest conduits.”

“The belly of the city,” Sylvia said softly.

“I got sucker-punched in the gut once,” Luke said, leaning back in his chair, arms behind his head. He glanced up at Sylvia and grinned. “It was weird. There I was on my back staring up at this biker asshole. I couldn't move, couldn't breathe. I just kept thinking he had a nicer tattoo than me.”

“Tattoo of what?” Sylvia smiled back.

“An angel . . .” He mimed generous female curves. “Hey, I was semiconscious.”

“So, what if a city gets sucker-punched?”

“Back when we were chasing Ben Black—after he escaped the Iraqis—we got our hands on some intelligence: he'd figured out the schematics to attack New York.”

Luke shifted in the chair, making leather stress and give. “We're not just talking the level of the 1993 World Trade Center and Sheik Rahman or Oklahoma City . . . It was going to be a simultaneous hit, multiple targets, enough to shut the city down for days—to impair functioning for months—perhaps to alter economic power structures.”

“And?” Sylvia prodded.

“Obviously it never happened,” Luke said. “New York still stands. We heard that report two weeks before U.S. missiles destroyed the training camp.”

“And if Black hadn't been killed?”

“One of these days a major U.S. city will be hit. A variation on the WTC bomb—or the more likely scenario, biological weapons.”

“Would you have caught up with Black without MOSAIK?”

“MOSAIK only took us so far.”

“Explain.” Sylvia leaned on Luke's desk, inches from his face.

Luke focused in on his screen, shifting images—plunging to an even deeper stratum below Los Angeles. He shook his head, his voice low. “Let's just say
luck
didn't hurt.”

4:21
P.M
.
The sun's heat lidded Los Angeles, agitating molecules, compressing, reacting, tinting the city's sky a dirty white.

Inside the professor's house on Selma it might have been midnight in Anchorage: the lights were achingly bright, the air conditioner iced the atmosphere, computers hummed compulsively.

Sweetheart had disappeared into his inner sanctum.

Sylvia's eyes ached from staring at pages, early maps of the Los Angeles pueblo. She was startled by a hand on her shoulder.

“Time for a break.” Luke smiled. “Follow me.”

The map man led her into new territory. As they passed through a wide hall where framed monotypes and etchings decorated the walls, she caught glimpses of early rural London, Paris in the 1800s, New York, and Los Angeles at the turn of the last century and back in the days of Spain's rule.

A floor-to-ceiling print of Los Angeles covered one wall. The old was melded with the new, a network of early Spanish aqueducts, crisscrossing railways and streetcars from the booster period, deco to postmodern functionalism. Animistic oil wells, movie billboards, and palm trees grew in place of other vegetation. The impression was of a city of invention instead of history.

Sylvia was studying the image so intently she almost bumped into Luke. He'd come to a standstill. Now, to her
right, she noticed a door; at first she thought it must lead to a closet. But he opened it and stepped through.

She followed him up two flights of a narrow twisting stairwell that led to a eight-by-eight widow's walk. Except for a massive evergreen, a magnolia, and an old willow, they were above the tree line. To the west, Los Angeles stretched from hillside to coastline; blocks in miniature were laid out as rough rectangular grids; main thoroughfares crisscrossed the city like ribbons over a package.

“We've all got our reasons for working on this project,” Luke said, leaning his hips against the railing. Sylvia turned to study him, and he shrugged. “Gretchen's cousin was one of the demolition experts who helped excavate the network of booby-trapped tunnels left from World War Two. Both sides used tons of mines and other explosives. You know that even today they're disarming those bombs on a daily basis?” He took a deep breath. “Her cousin died last year. Blew up and was buried under a ton of rock. They still can't decide if the bomb was German or English. Does it fucking matter?”

“And you?” Sylvia asked softly. “What's your reason?”

“The way the world is going—with the Internet, the crazies, all the access to materials, all the mean thinking.” He shrugged, sorrow aging his face. “I won't forget Jason. I want kids someday. I want them to grow old, have kids of their own.”

Sylvia nodded. Then she turned to gaze out at the world.

Soon, dusk would fall over a city where urban prophets abounded—the turn of 2000 had done nothing to dampen predictions of doom. Ruin could come with natural cataclysmic events such as earthquake, fire, drought; it could come through riots and other products of social and economic breakdown; it could come through acts of terrorism. If the opposition was smart enough, powerful enough, rich
enough, they might cripple a major urban center. Not
might
 . . .
would
, one of these days. That time was coming, just like Luke had described.

He was on the same train of thought. He said, “Cities are born, they have a life span . . . economic, cultural, social. Cycles of growth and expansion. I think we forget the other side of the cycle. Eventually, they die. They survive for a while, but diminished. Or they blow away with the wind, wash away with the tides.”

Sylvia nodded. “We see it in the Southwest—the Anasazi ruins: Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly.”

“That's right,” Luke said softly. “Entire civilizations—with calendars, astronomy, complex trading patterns, religion, and family units. And they disappeared almost overnight. Mexico, South America, Africa, the Middle East—they all claim ghost civilizations, thriving centers of culture turned to dust. I don't mean to sound grim, but even in the twentieth century, hurricanes and earthquakes altered the future of major urban areas. The hurricane that destroyed Galveston created another megahub: Houston–Dallas–Fort Worth.” He shrugged. “That's life.”

Sylvia rested her elbows on the railing of the widow's walk. All cities die. Urban energy shifts the way blood stops flowing to a dying organ—the brain reroutes it to more productive body parts.

But Los Angeles was a long way from dead.

Unless M had his way.

Light exploded off a strand of silver high-rises lining Sunset Boulevard—the last spark of day giving way to night. Sylvia closed her eyes, seemed to feel the city in every cell of her body. But she was already moving in another world.

New Mexico. A moonlit night in October . . . a walk in Chaco Canyon with Matt. Shadows cast, dark against light, bright as daylight. The cry of coyotes. She had led the way along the trail to Casa Grande. At one point an owl cried out, the primal call cut the dry night air. That's how raw the sound felt . . 
.

For hundreds of years, generations had been born here
.

And then they disappeared, leaving roads, calendars, ways to measure time, meetinghouses, graves. Leaving behind the ghosts of their endeavors for archaeologists to find and puzzle over
.

She and Matt had stopped at the ruins of the ancient pueblo. Alone in the desert, they had taken shelter inside a small home, made love in the sand
.

That night, back inside their tent, rain had woken her before daylight. For a few hours she thought she'd heard the whispered answers to ancient secrets
.

“Sylvia?” Luke's voice tugged her through space and time back to the present, back to urban reality. He appeared to be restless, ready to return to work. “Are you all right?”

“I'm okay,” Sylvia said softly. “I'll be down in a minute.”

Without a word he left the widow's walk, descending the stairs two at a time.

She gave him ten minutes. In that time, the sun dipped toward the ocean, dimming the sky, until the city was draped in shadow.

Had the Anasazi people felt the end of their world?

M was excavating the past. If he had his way, how long would it be before Hollywood joined Babylon?

Like a sleepwalker retracing her steps along the expansive hallway, catching glimpses of great cities as art, she heard the click of the keyboard as she entered the map
room. He had his back to her, and he was typing in commands. The screen flashed color, form, text—after a few minutes it seemed to settle on a solitary image.

“Hollywood-Babylon,” Sylvia said. “The map . . . try Babylon.”